Obloquy:
- Strong public condemnation.
‘he endured years of contempt and obloquy’- Disgrace, especially that brought about by public condemnation.
‘conduct to which no more obloquy could reasonably attach’ [Oxford Dictionaries]
- Disgrace, especially that brought about by public condemnation.
New word to me. Noted in “New Hope and New Danger on the Left,” Andrew Sullivan, New York:
If the Democrats want to fight the next election on the need for a radical rebalancing of the economy in favor of the middle and working class, for massive investment in new green technology, for higher taxes on the superrich, and for health-care security for all Americans, they can win. If they conflate those goals with extremist rhetoric about abolishing everyone’s current health insurance, and starting from scratch, as the Green New Deal advises, not so much. If they insist that men and women are indistinguishable, that girls can have penises and boys can have periods, as transgender ideology now demands, they’ll seem nuts to most fair-minded people.
If they echo the anti-Semitism of the far right, they’ll deserve obloquy. If left ideology seems to be overruling practical good sense — like ruling out nuclear power as an option for tackling the climate crisis in the Green New Deal, they’ll seem unserious purists. If they insist on calling our multicultural and multiracial democracy a manifestation of “white supremacy,” they will empower real white supremacists. If they call a border wall an “immorality” and refuse to fund a way to detain and humanely house the huge surge of migrant families and children now overwhelming the southern border (up 290 percent over the same period in 2018, with a record 1,800 apprehensions on Monday of this week alone!), they will rightly be called in favor of open borders.
Andrew talks a lot of sense, but he seems as short-sighted about the illegal immigrants at the southern border as do most Republicans. Shutting them out rather than investigating root causes merely kicks the can down the road.
And that can may be a helluva lot larger in a couple of decades.
